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Running DPA with SQL Express?

I see in the documentation that SolarWinds claims they will not support running DPA on SQL Express; however, if I am only monitoring one database instance is there any reason why SQL Express wouldn't be adequate for this?

  • We expect DPA to work with SQL Express as a repo, but given a number of its limitations, especially in DB size, you would have to adjust DPA to save less data, which kinda defeats the purpose of DPA.

    If you need a free DB, why not use MySQL?

  • We have much more in-house expertise on SQL Server than we do MySQL.

    Just to make sure I understand, with the out-of-the-box settings DPA will try and store more data than SQL Express is capable of handling even when only monitoring one SQL instance?

  • Mileage varies with storage consumption, but I have my personal configuration using SQL Express and monitoring 1 Oracle and 1 SQL Server instance. Haven't run out of space yet, but my instances are not running much activity (I forget to startup hammerdb sometimes). 8 )

    Thus the mileage may vary.

    My recommendation is to run it and really focus on storage consumption around day 15 as that *should* represent about 50% of your total storage needs as a rule of thumb. Adjust as needed. When reducing retention, detail data accounts for about 90% of the storage consumption, so hourly and daily retention retention really aren't big levers.

  • mandevil​ thanks for the pointers, I really appreciate it!